Latent If Not Present: Arriving at and Departing from Lito Mayo

Abstract

Arriving at Lito Mayo's early departure (Lipa, 1954–Manila, 1983) conjures the lifework of the poet, painter, and printmaker who so thought of lifeforms as always recasting that he conceived of realms regardless and regardful of their limits. Reared by family members active in the Philippine Revolution, Mayo employs the idiom of southern Tagalog Catholicism ciphered through strategies of warfare and freemasonry in an intaglio practice thoughtfully engaged in marginalia's frontiers, reversal's intellect, and pressure's persuasions. Such tropes emerge from procedures of print conscious of the relentless repercussions of a coloniality intrinsically linked to his epoch's fight against dictatorship and ecological destruction. Within this ominous horizon, Mayo repeats and embodies the anting-anting (charm) and taong-ibon (bird-human), rendering vain the binary of the visible and invisible so as to treat cogent those which are "capable of emerging". This is the weight and flight of Mayo's thinking around which the material of this monograph is ordered: the artist charms the writer's availability just as the essay finds Mayo latent if not present.